Love’s Labour’s Lost – 2012

Berowne:
Our wooing doth not end like an old play:
Jack hath not Jill.These ladies’ courtesy
Might well hath made our sport a comedy.

King:
Come, sir, it wants a twelve month and a day
And then ‘twill end.

Berowne:
That’s too long for a play.

Act V. Scene 2

Love’s Labour’s Lost is a fun romantic comedy mocking men for their susceptibility to fall head-over-heels in love with a beautiful woman! This delightful play is full of love poems and letters, gifts and entertainment; words to make your heart sing and words to make your head swim!

It is a story in which a King and three lords, shadowed by a group of lowlier characters, swear an oath to study for three years, living a life of austerity, but then break their vows by falling in love with a visiting Princess and her three ladies, and are subsequently separated from their women for a year and a day when the Princess hears of her father’s death. It is a charming and touching tale in which the women definitely come out on top!!!

Love’s Labour’s Lost has finally come into its own. After more than three centuries of neglect, this play is now popular for precisely those qualities which previously kept it from favour. It has no towering central role: no Hamlet or Falstaff, and in the days of Garrick and the Victorian actor-managers, when audiences demanded star actors playing star parts, this made it theatrically unattractive. Now audiences are prepared to respect the play’s sociability, its breadth, its capacity to accommodate on more or less equal dramatic terms a whole community of characters from a king to a constable and clown.